Marvin Gaye
There were many different Marvin Gayes. In the 1960s, He was a Motown heartthrob known for his breezy duets with the likes of Tammi Terrell, Mary Wells and Kim Weston; in the early 1970s, he was an astute critic of world affairs rousing fans out of their carefree apathy; years later, his erotic soul would soundtrack the conception of generations of future Gaye fans. In all these iterations, Gaye could be cast as the pinnacle of soul – his music consistently sensual, provocative, visionary and honest. For Gaye himself, music was perhaps his only escape from the ruptures and traumas that comprised his life. It’s a cruel irony that the star of “Let’s Get it On” and “Sexual Healing” craved intimacy and connection to his last days; it’s puzzling that his mind was at once capacious enough to conceive of the generational consciousness-raiser What’s Going On and meticulously paranoid enough to record Here, My Dear, a double-album kiss-off to his ex-wife. The music – those lush, sensual visions of communion and completion – is what squared those warring factions of his soul.
In Chronological Order
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By the time Marvin Gaye performed at New York's famed Copacabana nightclub in 1966, he had already established himself as an anchor of the Motown roster and a superstar of black pop. Tempered, polite and versatile, Live at the Copa was supposed to cement Gaye's appeal to the mainstream pop marketplace: he wanted to be a crooner. Following the examples of Sammy Davis, Jr., Sam Cooke and the Supremes, artists credited with integrating the august venue, Gaye's set was engineered to appeal to the Copa's genteel, white audience: standards and ballads predominate, alongside gleefully brisk takes on his hits and perfunctory, medley-dashes through the Motown back catalogue. His warm, abundant voice oozes class at every turn. His version of the fittingly quasi-Brazilian pop hit "Laia Ladaia (Reza)" is entrancing, and the band's rendition of "Ain't That Peculiar" courses with a playful urgency. A longstanding feud with Berry Gordy, Motown's mastermind and Gaye's brother-in-law, marooned Live at the Copa in the Motown vaults until 2005. Had it been released in 1967, as intended, Live could have been Gaye's breakthrough. But given what was to come, perhaps it's best that Gaye's ascension was delayed a few years.
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As the story goes: Berry Gordy, Motown's mastermind and Gaye's brother-in-law, loathed "What's Going On," going so far as to dismiss it as one of the worst songs he had ever heard. With the benefit of hindsight, this seems patently absurd. But from the perspective of Gordy, the Motown brand had been built on hit singles and a carefree, pop sensibility. Harmony was ideology: the duet suggested the possibility of social order, maybe even unity. As Gaye presented Gordy with "What's Going On," however, Motown was still adapting to a changed landscape. On the other end of a tumultuous decade, there emerged new possibilities for pop artists and audiences, new definitions of what it meant to be an American. Within a year, Gordy would move the Motown operation from Detroit to Los Angeles.
more »After a series of "near-violent" arguments, Gordy green-lit the single, if only to prove Gaye a fool. Gaye, of course, was instantly proved right. "What's Going On" was a worldwide crossover hit, and it would eventually inspire stirring cover versions from the likes of Donny Hathaway, Big Youth, Les McCann and even Cyndi Lauper. It is a captivating song, from its opening horn sigh to the way its presumed answer seems to lie just beyond reach, the song ending as the band approaches its sonic peak. While the single and subsequent album of the same name (released in 1971) challenged the expectations of Motown's core audience, they also inaugurated a new era of soul music. Gaye traded Motown's triumphalist visions of love conquering all for more abstract ecstasies: peace, justice, compassion, community and tranquility. Musically, What's Going On experimented with a broader palette of sounds, dabbling in jazz and orchestral arrangements.
It's notable that Gordy was fine with the album's embrace of counter-cultural positions. His problem was logistical: he didn't like the way Gaye sequenced the album, allowing the songs to bleed into one another. But for Gaye, the songs that comprised What's Going On represented a single, consistent statement on world affairs. Again: Gaye was right. There's a seamless quality to the album, even as Gaye's sense of hope crests and crashes from song to song. "War is not the answer/Only love can conquer hate," he pleas on the epochal title track, describing a world of togetherness beyond the innocent handholding of his older tunes. A stirring, sensitive watchfulness powers "Save the Children" and "Mercy, Mercy Me," the latter a seduction on behalf of Mother Earth. "Say man, I just don't understand what's going on across this land," Gaye laments on the following cut, "What's Happening Brother," re-imagining the panorama of struggle from the perspective of a lone veteran who's just returned home. Meanwhile the astounding album-closer "Inner City Blues" is a final call to take what you've heard seriously, Gaye's angelic voice our sole defense against the despair he describes.
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Trouble Man was an unusual follow-up to the universally-praised What's Going On. After the success of the latter, Gaye began spending more time in Los Angeles, exploring new career opportunities as an actor and musician in Hollywood. Following in the footsteps of Isaac Hayes (Shaft) and Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Gaye recorded this soundtrack for the (largely forgettable) Blaxploitation film Trouble Man. Composed largely of instrumentals, Trouble Man sounds funkier and more modern than most Motown releases of the time, due in part to Gaye's copious use of synthesizer. Playful synth squiggles add texture to "Don't Mess With Mister 'T'" and "'T' Plays it Cool," a breakbeat and B-Boy classic which continues to enjoy a second life among hip-hop audiences. After the deeply personal and thoughtful What's Going On, Gaye's rare vocal appearances here are spare and atmospheric, as on the dead-end blues of "Cleo's Apartment" or the pensive "Life is a Gamble." The standout is the title cut, Gaye's wounded but proud falsetto applied to a tale of the struggle and tenacity which props up his swagger. "I come up hard, baby/But now I'm cool," he coos, "I didn't make it, sugar/Playin' by the rules."
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After What's Going On and Trouble Man, Gaye suffered through a miserable spell of writer's block. Motown was changing, Berry Gordy having moved its headquarters from Detroit to Los Angeles, and Gaye was slowly beginning to feel the pressure that comes with an unprecedented kind of celebrity. As his marriage to Berry's sister Anna continued to implode in rather spectacular fashion, Gaye began scrutinizing the forces, from his abusive father to his newfound spirituality, which had shaped his relationship to desire, love, masculinity and duty.
more »Released in 1973, Let's Get it On was to the bedroom what What's Going On was to the world outside it. Like Gaye's provocative and nuanced landmark of social commentary, Gaye didn't intend for Let's Get it On to be taken literally, the lightly pornographic moan-a-thon "You Sure Love to Ball" notwithstanding. Rather, Let's Get it On was to be meditative and philosophical, a celebration but also careful study of the contours of human sexuality. "I contend that SEX IS SEX and LOVE IS LOVE," Gaye wrote in the album's original liner notes, and Let's Get it On can be seen as a sustained exploration of the possibility that these two forces might be aligned as one.
Let's Get it On is sensual, erotic and deeply carnal; but it also begs the heavens for a higher, more redemptive kind of connection. Sonically, the album is warm and expansive, a willing marriage of old-school harmonies and gentle funk grooves. "Come Get to This," with its easy, clap-along tempo and Gaye's beaming vocals, recalls Motown's mid '60s heyday for a bygone vision of easy, effortless love. "There's nothing wrong with me loving you," he belts on the title track, a masterpiece of come-hither neuroticism. Gaye's anxieties about intimacy come to the fore on tracks like the luscious "Distant Lover," the husband-scorned lines of "Just to Keep You Satisfied" and the eerily gorgeous ballad "If I Should Die Tonight." For millions of listeners past and present, Let's Get it On, with its ethic of eternal, effortless devotion, is a near-perfect soundtrack for a romantic night in, or at least a stand-in for what we can't ourselves summon in language. For Gaye, though, it was something more: a climax — spiritual, transcendental, metaphysical—he could never achieve.
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One need look no further than Let's Get it On and "Sexual Healing" to confirm Gaye's credentials as one of soul's great romancers, but I Want You, released in 1976, might just capture Gaye at his most erotic. His voice rarely rises above a lusty moan or a teasing whisper, each song carried by an urge to coax and massage his lover toward the bedroom. Credit is due to Leon Ware, a singer, songwriter and producer responsible for the album's sultry ambiance. The brilliant, hypnotic title track awakens slowly with congas, gliding strings, horns, electric guitar verging toward release; Gaye coos and hums, eventually joining in earnest about a minute and half in. It's more of an atmosphere than a song. "I want you to want me too," he offers gently, still craving the cosmic reciprocity that felt just beyond grasp.
more »As his marriage to Anna Gordy continued to dissolve, a burgeoning affair with Janis Hunter, for whom he claimed a profound, vexing "love-lust," revitalized him. Ware's arrangements lend the album a laid-back, spaced-out, funky openness that represented a new direction for both Gaye and Motown. There's an unbridled, untroubled sexuality to "Feel All My Love Inside" and "Come Live With Me Angel," while his all-too-brief take on Michael Jackson's "I Wanna Be Where You Are" (originally penned by Ware) is patient and coy. Unlike his previous albums, Gaye uses the full range of his voice judiciously on I Want You, preferring instead to shadow the dense, glossy layers of instrumentation. But as he proves on tracks like "After the Dance" and "Soon I'll Be Loving You Again," sometimes a suggestive whisper or directed moan was invitation enough.
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In the mid-1970s, Marvin Gaye was in a tailspin. From his protracted, painful divorce to his confidence-destroying drug addiction to the mounting pressures associated with a changing soul marketplace, Gaye was uncertain about the direction of his career. He agreed to tour Europe to regain his bearings, distance himself from problems at home and earn some money to pay off his mounting debts. Of course none of these anxieties are discernible on this landmark live double-album, recorded over a series of nights at the London Palladium in fall of 1976. Gaye is a radiant, engaging presence, and the appreciative crowd, hosting their American soul hero for the first time in a decade, obliges with adoring shrieks, shouts and claps. There's a feeling of intimacy to Gaye's performance, particularly on the three career-spanning medleys. A new studio recording accompanied this magisterial set: "Got to Give it Up," a joyous twelve-minute funk number that signaled Motown's (and, implicitly, Gaye's) intention to keep apace with soul's new directions. The single gestured toward disco without completely surrendering itself over, its resilient, optimistic tempo at odds with Gaye's tale of a dancehall wallflower, watching from the sidelines.
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Over the course of Marvin Gaye's career, he recorded stunning albums with an esteemed circle of leading ladies: Mary Wells, Kim Weston, Tammi Terrell, Diana Ross. In a perverse way, this baffling 1978 double-album works similarly, though instead of pantomimed affections, its engine was Gaye's acrimonious divorce from Anna Gordy. Having lapsed on a series of alimony and child support payments, Gaye agreed to give Gordy half the proceeds of Here, My Dear—thus the title. Gaye toyed with the idea of sabotaging the album, as a way of spiting Gordy. Instead, he relived their break-up in excruciating, at times uncomfortable, detail. "This is what you wanted," he seems to mock on the title track, its harmonies and strings feeling hollow and ironic beneath Gaye's sarcastic accusations. He sings at half-strength, bitterly accusing Gordy of using their son as a way of keeping him "in line." Even for an artist like Gaye, who had no problem wearing his emotions on his sleeve, Here, My Dear is wrenchingly personal. He describes the bounds of his frustration on the funky "Anger," his words clashing with the smooth, controlled sound of his voice. "A Funky Space Reincarnation" is a masterpiece of cosmic funk, as Gaye imagines love in an alternate dimension, light years away from divorce lawyers and custody fights. Few artists have ever written songs as transparent as "Anna's Song" and "You Can Leave, But it's Going to Cost You," which are meticulous in recounting the couple's various break-ups and make-ups. Still, it's telling that Gaye, even at his most cynical, manages to sound so effortlessly sweet. Then again, even Gaye himself couldn't stay sullen: his idealism resurfaces, briefly, on "Falling in Love Again," devoted to his new muse, Janis Hunter.
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As with Live at the Copa, which was shelved for nearly four decades, this album of standards, originally recorded in 1979 but unreleased until 1997, makes for an interesting what-could-have-been. In the mid-1960s, Gaye aspired to branch out from the polished Motown sound. But his desire to sing jazz and pop standards clashed with label boss Berry Gordy's vision for Gaye's career, and his ambitions would lie dormant for over a decade. In the late 1970s, however, as Gaye coped with the rise of disco and his own evolving ambitions, he returned to the material that had once entranced him. Working with producer and arranger Bobby Scott, Gaye recorded renditions of classics like "The Shadow of Your Smile" and "I Won't Cry Anymore." His takes are smooth and refined, and Scott's arrangements return Gaye to his mid-1960s ambitions to follow in the footsteps of Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr. In the interim, however, Gaye pioneered a different kind of superstardom. Crashing from that self-made perch, there's a profound weariness to his versions of "Why Did I Choose You?" and "I Wish I Didn't Love You So," as though the songs were his alone. Frustrated by the underwhelming sales of his previous albums, Gaye decided against releasing these songs. Three years later, he would experience the high point of his career, the global smash Midnight Love and its unavoidable single, "Sexual Healing."
